Google: Faculty Research Awards program

To facilitate interaction between Google and academia... The intent of the Google Research Awards is to support cutting-edge research in Computer Science, Engineering, and related fields. Most awards are in the $40K-$70K range. The maximum amount a PI can request is $150K. Proposals must have a Google technical sponsor, who will act as a liaison. Google asks applicants to categorize their proposals into one of the following broad research areas of interest to Google:
- Economics and market algorithms;
- Education innovation;
- Geo/maps;
- Human-computer interaction;
- Information retrieval, extraction, and organization;
- Machine learning and data mining;
- Machine perception;
- Machine translation;
- Mobile;
- Natural language processing;
- Networking;
- Policy and standards;
- Privacy;
- Security;
- Social networks;
- Software engineering;
- Speech;
- Structured data and database management;
- Systems (hardware and software).
http://research.google.com/university/relations/research_awards.html